To Your Scattered Bodies Go

"It was not until your 777th death that we got around to looking at some of the higher frequency resurrections. Yours had the highest count. You may be congratulated on this, I suppose."

"There were others, as well?’

"They’re not being pursued, if that’s what you mean. And, relatively speaking, they’re not many. We had no idea that it was you who had racked up this staggering number. Your space in the PR bubble was empty when we looked at it during our Statistical investigation. The two technicians who had seen you when you woke up in the PR chamber identified you by your photograph.

"We set the resurrector so that the next time your body was to be re-created, an alarm would notify us, and we would bring you here to this place."

"Suppose I hadn’t died again?" Burton said.

"You were destined to die! You planned on trying to enter the polar sea via The River’s mouth, right?! That is impossible. The last hundred miles of The River go through an underground tunnel. Any boat would be torn to pieces. Like others who have dared the journey, you would have died."

Burton said, "My photograph — the one I took from Agneau. That was obviously taken on Earth when I was an officer for John Company in India. How was that gotten?"

"Research, Mr. Burton," Loga said, still smiling.

Burton wanted to smash the look of superiority on his face. He did not seem to be restrained by anything; he could, seemingly, walk over to Loga and strike him. But he knew that the Ethicals were not likely to sit in the same room with him without safeguards. They would as soon have given a rabid hyena its freedom.

Did you ever find out what made me awaken before my time?" he asked. "Or what made those others gain consciousness, too?" Loga gave a start. Several of the men and women gasped.

Loga rallied first. He said, "We’ve made a thorough examination of your body. You have no idea how thorough. We have also screened every component of your … psychomorph, I think you could call it. Or aura, whichever word you prefer."

He "gestured at the sphere above his head. "We found no clues whatsoever."

Burton threw back his head and laughed loudly and long.

"So you bastards don’t know everything!"

Loga smiled tightly. "No. We never will. Only One is Omnipotent" He touched his forehead, lips, heart, and genitals with the three longest fingers of his right hand. The others did the same.

"However, I’ll tell you that you frightened us -if that’ll make you feel any better. You still do. You see, we are fairly sure that you may be one of the men of whom we were warned."

"Warned against? By whom?"

"By, a… sort of giant computer, a living one. And by its operator." Again, he made the curious sign with his fingers.

"That’s all I care to tell you — even though you won’t remember a thing that occurs down here after we send you back to the Rivervalley." Burton’s mind was clouded with anger, but not so much that he missed the "down here." Did that mean that the resurrection machinery and the hideout of the Ethicals were below the surface of the Riverworld?

Loga continued, "The data indicates you may have the potentiality to wreck our plans. Why you should or hoes you might, we do not know. But we respect our source of information, how highly you can’t imagine."

"If you believe that," Burton said, "why don’t you just put me in cold storage? Suspend me between those two bars. Leave me floating in space, turning around and around forever, like a roast on a spit, until your plans are completed?" Loge said, "We couldn’t do that! That act alone would ruin everything! How would you attain your salvation? Besides, that would mean an unforgivable violence on our part! It’s unthinkable!

"You were being violent when you forced me to run and hide from you," Burton said. "You are being violent now by holding me here against my will. And you will violate me when you destroy my memory of this little tete-a-tete with you.’

Loge almost wrung his hands. If he was the Mysterious Stranger, the renegade Ethical, he was a great actor.

In a grieved tone, Loga said, "That is only partly true. We had to take certain measures to protect ourselves. If the man had been anyone but you, we would have left you strictly alone. It is true we violated our own code of ethics by making you run from us and by examining you. That had to be, however. And, believe me, we are paying for this in mental agony."

"You could make up for some of it by telling me why I, why all the human beings that ever lived, have been resurrected. And how you did it.’

Loga talked, with occasional interruptions from some of the others. The yellow-haired woman broke in most often, and after a while Burton deduced from her attitude and Loga’s that she was either his wife or she held a high position.